Teacher has student. Student does not love subject matter. Student does love extracurricular. Student is gone for long period of time. Student returns to school, and makes no mention at all of doing any make-up work. Nor does student take any action to do work that had been due previous to long absence.

Ready for the punchline?

STUDENT BLAMES TEACHER FOR EXTRACURRICULAR INELIGIBILITY!

I’m in stitches! I am going to laugh so hard I could pee! Hilarious, right?

Well, okay, truth. I want to cry. I know that they are babies. Right after spring break, they have come back acting like it. I have never seen so many tears. And the pushing! Don’t get me started about the pushing! And screaming. Oh. My. G-d. EVERYTHING merits screaming. I am reminded about the phase that a toddler I cared for went through. This toddler liked to bite people. For every reason imaginable. She liked to bite as a means of greeting, and as a means of saying goodbye, and to express frustration, and to express happiness, and excitement, and fear. Everything. But she didn’t bite herself, which would have been concerning enough. She bit the people in nearest proximity. Adults, children…once I saw her try to bite a cat because the cat was being so cute. The affection was returned in kind. I am pretty sure she still has scars.

She grew out of it. She is a mature, self-aware, kind, brilliant, athletic, empathetic young woman now, in her early twenties. To the best of my knowledge, she hasn’t bitten anyone in at least a decade. Thinking of her, I am heartened, a little bit. These babies will grow out of it.

Return to student in joke. Out of frustration, he bit me. I mean…obviously he didn’t BITE me. Gross. Post-COVID? I shudder to think. No, he bit me with his words. Fortunately, as I remind myself often, I am a grown @$$ woman and do not need to be invested in the opinions of a twelve year old. The hard part is this:

In my soul (and vocation), I am a teacher. I picked the middle grades because I observed through watching a lot of different kids grow up that this is the time when the water is most choppy for them. The hard lessons are being learned, and because they are still just babies, they can’t see how low the stakes are. Student is frustrated that he can’t do the extracurricular activity that he is so invested in. He believes with all his little baby heart that I am keeping him from doing it because I don’t care. Or because I hate him. Or because he hates my class. (Perish the thought!) And now, it is going to be that much harder to reach him. He’s out on choppy waters and he can’t see that I want him to have the lifejacket, he just has to put it on and use it. And I am still going to try. I didn’t work this hard, and study for this many tests, and wait this long to do this job, only to be foiled by a 12 year old.

Besides, I did time as a nanny. To wee tiny children. It’s going to take more than a tantrum to squash me. I once convinced a child to eat peas by calling them nature’s candy. Yeah. So I just need to figure out how to trick a twelve-year-old toddler into eating his ELA.